In the Shadow of the Palaces. Honoring the Dead during the Neopalatial Period
(2013) Popular religion and ritual in the east Mediterranean from the 3rd millennium BC to the 5th century AD — Location: Athènes (10.December.2013)
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- The scarcity of burials is a central characteristic of the Neopalatial archaeological record. Beside questions regarding how the living treated the body of their deceased, the discretion of the Neopalatial funerary landscape has led many authors to suggest that ritual activities were then mostly connected to the palatial sphere. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, it intends to review the available evidence concerning burial practices from the collapse of the first palaces until the last destructions of the LM IB period. This task is essential to reassess the extent and diversity of the Neopalatial funerary record. Secondly, this paper aims at dating and characterizing the gradual process of abandonment of the cemeteries that occurred in favor of other ritual contexts. In doing so, we argue for a non-deliberate transfer from the funerary to the palatial realm from the MM IIA onwards at the latest. The main impetus behind this transfer would have been the all-pervasive infiltration of the palatial ideology, which would have turned the old burial sites into inadequate social arenas in contrast to the larger-scale ritual gatherings that were then orchestrated by the palaces. The available evidence suggests nonetheless that the ancestral funerary practices survive to a limited extent into the Neopalatial, while testifying to a wide variety of interests on the part of the communities who chose archaeologically visible forms of burials. Localized wish to connect to ancestors lines, simple but caring burial of corpses, or adoption of new, mainland-oriented practices tend to indicate that, in spite of the meagerness of the record, funerary contexts did not entirely lose their role as meaningful ritual scenes for metaphysical beliefs and personal interests.
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Déderix, S., & Devolder, M. N. (2013). In the Shadow of the Palaces. Honoring the Dead during the Neopalatial Period. Popular religion and ritual in the east Mediterranean from the 3rd millennium BC to the 5th century AD, Athènes. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/69149